A Bridge of Culture

A Bridge of Culture

How An American College in Istanbul Became A Turkish University

During the 38 years of its existence Boğaziçi University has perpetuated the cultural traditions it inherited from Robert College, and it is generally considered to be one of the top undergraduate institutions in the world, with outstanding graduate programs in most fields other than medicine and law. Though it is a Turkish state university, the language of instruction in almost all courses is English; the majority of its faculty have doctorates from American universities and most of its outstanding students go on to do graduate studies at universities in the U. S. Our students come from every province of Turkey and from more than sixty other countries, for Boğaziçi University is a cultural beacon that shines across national boundaries and internal political divisions, distinguished by the diversity of its student body and faculty and its tolerance of ethnic, religious, and cultural differences. And so my book will examine the ways in which Robert College and Boğaziçi University have been a bridge of culture between what orientalists have called East and West.

Ek bilgi

John Freely was born in New York in 1926. He joined the U.S. Navy at the age of 17, serving in a commando unit in the Pacific, Burma and China during the last year of World War II. He returned to school after the war and obtained a Ph.D. in physics at New York University in 1960. In September 1960 he came to Istanbul with his wife and three children beginning his tenure as Professor of Physics at the Robert College Yüksek Okulu. He remained in Istanbul until 1976, continuing on the faculty during the first five years of Boğaziçi University. He returned to Boğaziçi University in 1999, after living and working in Athens, Boston, New York, London and Venice. His first book was Strolling Through Istanbul, co-authored with Hilary Sumner-Boyd, published in 1972. Since then he has written more than thirty books, the most recent of which are Istanbul, The Imperial City (1994) and Inside the Seraglio, Private Lives of the Ottoman Sultans in Istanbul (1999).

Tamamlayıcı Kitaplar

A Bosporus Adventure is a history of the Woman's College at Constantinople by a former president. Mary Mills Patrick was born 10 March 1850 in Canterbury, New Hampshire to John & Harriet (White) Patrick. She graduated from the Lyons Collegiate Institute in Lyons, Iowa, in 1869. In 1871, by appointment of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, she became a teacher in a mission school in Erzurum. In her four years there Patrick learned ancient and modern Armenian. In 1875 she was transferred to the American High School for Girls in Üsküdar, and she became principal of the school in 1889. During her summers she lived in Greek villages. She thus was able to add Greek and Turkish to her repertoire of languages. After a study furlough in the United States she received a master’s degree from the University of Iowa in 1890. In that year, after much planning and the securing of a charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the American High School became the American College for Girls at Constantinople, later known as Constantinople Woman’s College. Patrick served as president of the college from its opening. Her summer studies at the Universities of Heidelberg, Zürich, Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, and Oxford resulted in a Ph.D. from the University of Bern, Switzerland, in 1897. Her dissertation was published in 1899 as Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism. When the college was destroyed by fire in 1905, a new site was acquired in Arnavutköyü on the European side of the Bosporus. A new charter in 1908 ended the college’s ties to the mission board, and in 1914 the new campus was occupied. Patrick kept the school open through the Balkan Wars, the Turkish revolution, and World War I, and through those changes it evolved from a school primarily for minority Greek, Armenian, and Bulgarian Christian women into a leading centre of higher education for Turkish women. She remained president until her retirement in 1924, after which she moved back to the United States. The American College for Girls later affiliated with nearby Robert College for men.

Shaping New Minds and Robert College in Late Ottoman Society (1863-1923)

This book is dedicated to Robert College’s 150th anniversary. Being founded by American missionaries in Constantinople in 1863, the college kept its vitality due to its ability to adjust the sound theory of education introduced by its founders and instructors to the changing social and political context, as well as its alumni who distinguished themselves as professionals and leaders, but above all as characters. The book approaches the Ottoman period of Robert College’s sesquicentennial history by focusing on certain hitherto neglected topics and issues related to its nature and educational ideals, as well as to its student body, and by exploring the college’s archives, dispersed in Turkey and the United States, the government archives of Ottoman and early republican period, and other vernacular archives. The book moves the object of research from the subjects who were responsible for the foundation, function and development of the college toward the object of their educational activity: the students. To this aim the book is focused on the student body and space is provided for the voice of students as preserved in their recollections.

The book delineates the specific place and role of the college in the field of Ottoman education by promoting Protestant ideals through liberal education. On paper the college was an independent institution that was not aimed at proselytizing the local peoples but in reality the religious character of the college was indisputable. The so-called “secular Protestantism” affected the whole concept of education practiced at the college and it affected more or less the students’ mindset. The college put emphasis on the formation of strong characters in its students so as to make them able to take responsibility for their own life and development. It was achieved, not only nor even mainly through the course of studies in a wide variety of fields, but also through the all-round atmosphere in the college and especially the personal relationship between the students and their instructor. On the basis of statistics drawn from various relevant sources, the book traces out the dynamics in student enrollment and outlines those periods in the college’s history in which certain nationalities were prevalent, not only in terms of physical presence but also in terms of influence in the student body. The book defines subsequent “national” periods, specifically “Bulgarian”, “Armenian”, “Greek”, and “Turkish” periods, paying special attention to the relations between the nationalities represented in Robert College’s student body. The book provides also prosopographical research of the Bulgarian and Turkish students, based on data collected from the catalogues of students, preserved in the college archives.

The book combines various approaches characteristic of different fields and thus is a multidisciplinary study of Robert College’s Ottoman past. Being focused on certain issues related to the nature and educational ideals of the college in close relation with its student body, the book reveals previously unexplored or partly and insufficiently studied aspects that have much to do with disciplines and sub-disciplines such as social history, history of religion, history of education, cultural studies, and political studies.

The Bosphorus Papers. Studies in Turkish Grammar 1996-1999 com-prises a series of articles prepared by Gerjan van Schaaik after he came to Istanbul in 1996 to teach at Boğaziçi University. Having worked pre-viously at the Department of Computational Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, Van Schaaik found on the shores of the Bosphorus an excellent and most inspiring place to work on the structure of Turkish, a field which has always held a great fascination for him. This work follows an earlier publication, Studies in Turkish Grammar. He is currently work-ing on The Noun in Turkish. Its Argument Structure and the Compound-ing Straitjacket. Other research projects Van Schaaik has been involved in at Boğaziçi University are the construction of A Computerised Corpus of Turkish Texts and A Frequency Count of Turkish Words.

AYNI KATEGORİDEN KİTAPLAR

Shaping New Minds and Robert College in Late Ottoman Society (1863-1923)

This book is dedicated to Robert College’s 150th anniversary. Being founded by American missionaries in Constantinople in 1863, the college kept its vitality due to its ability to adjust the sound theory of education introduced by its founders and instructors to the changing social and political context, as well as its alumni who distinguished themselves as professionals and leaders, but above all as characters. The book approaches the Ottoman period of Robert College’s sesquicentennial history by focusing on certain hitherto neglected topics and issues related to its nature and educational ideals, as well as to its student body, and by exploring the college’s archives, dispersed in Turkey and the United States, the government archives of Ottoman and early republican period, and other vernacular archives. The book moves the object of research from the subjects who were responsible for the foundation, function and development of the college toward the object of their educational activity: the students. To this aim the book is focused on the student body and space is provided for the voice of students as preserved in their recollections.

The book delineates the specific place and role of the college in the field of Ottoman education by promoting Protestant ideals through liberal education. On paper the college was an independent institution that was not aimed at proselytizing the local peoples but in reality the religious character of the college was indisputable. The so-called “secular Protestantism” affected the whole concept of education practiced at the college and it affected more or less the students’ mindset. The college put emphasis on the formation of strong characters in its students so as to make them able to take responsibility for their own life and development. It was achieved, not only nor even mainly through the course of studies in a wide variety of fields, but also through the all-round atmosphere in the college and especially the personal relationship between the students and their instructor. On the basis of statistics drawn from various relevant sources, the book traces out the dynamics in student enrollment and outlines those periods in the college’s history in which certain nationalities were prevalent, not only in terms of physical presence but also in terms of influence in the student body. The book defines subsequent “national” periods, specifically “Bulgarian”, “Armenian”, “Greek”, and “Turkish” periods, paying special attention to the relations between the nationalities represented in Robert College’s student body. The book provides also prosopographical research of the Bulgarian and Turkish students, based on data collected from the catalogues of students, preserved in the college archives.

The book combines various approaches characteristic of different fields and thus is a multidisciplinary study of Robert College’s Ottoman past. Being focused on certain issues related to the nature and educational ideals of the college in close relation with its student body, the book reveals previously unexplored or partly and insufficiently studied aspects that have much to do with disciplines and sub-disciplines such as social history, history of religion, history of education, cultural studies, and political studies.

Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference in Turkish Linguistics

This volume is a collection of some of the papers presented at the 10th International Conference on Turkish Linguistics held at Boğaziçi University August 16-18, 2000. It contains papers presented in the following categories: syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology, phonetics, language acquisition, language impairment, bilingualism, NLP, dialectology of Turkish and various aspects of Turkic languages.